Jonathan Shih Assessing Bailenson, et. al’s “Transformed social interaction: Decoupling representation from behavior and form in collaborative virtual environments” Bailenson, Beall, Loomis, Blascovich, and Turk’s paper on Transformed Social Interaction (TSI) brings up many intriguing issues in regards to the future of mediated communications. The implications that they suggest involving the ability to transform elements of human interactions in real-time, however, are somewhat questionable, and are in need of further investigation. In the technology-driven world we live in today, we are flooded with options as to how we choose to communicate with one another – in person, by mail, by electronic mail, by electronic instant message, by video conference, and the list goes on. Bailenson, et. al argue that a new method of mediated communication, collaborative virtual environments (CVE), will soon become prevalent in the world because they maximize the benefits of phone-based, electronic-based, and video-based communications while minimizing their disadvantages. For instance, since researchers have shown that much of human-based communications rely on cues from non-verbal behaviors, CVEs have a distinct advantage over phone-to-phone and electronic-based communications. In addition, since researchers have also shown that the effectiveness of human-to-human communications is strongly affected by the maintaining of mutual eye gaze, and since most video conferencing setups prevent this from happening because users can only choose to either look at the screen or the camera at a single moment in time, CVEs take care of this problem easily. The term Transformed Social Interaction (TSI) predicts that people in an interaction will be able to communicate with one another more effectively because the infrastructure of a CVE can provide them with augmented information about the world and increased control over their nonverbal behaviors and physical represenations. This has particular implications for people who enter interactions with special goals in mind – for example, if someone has a desire to change the attitudes of another person or to persuade him/her to do something that s/he might not otherwise do. Bailenson, et. al describe three major components of TSI: transforming self- representations, transforming sensory capabilities, and transforming contextual situation. For the purposes of this paper, I will focus the rest of this assessment on their suggested implications of how transforming self-representations within CVEs might dramatically change mediated communications in the future. It has been shown many times in psychology research that similarity breeds attraction – that is, human beings are drawn to those who they perceive to be alike. According to Bailenson, et. al, people do the same in virtual environments: people treat digital avatars (and even simple images) that look like themselves more intimately than avatars that look like others. They used as their measures a participant’s willingness to perform embarrassing acts in front of these digital representations and that participant’s ratings of how attractive and likable they perceive the avatars to be. This is especially interesting since we can assume that the participants are entirely cognizant of the fact that they are viewing digital images and representations and not actual people – these findings are very similar to the conclusions of Nass and Moon’s 2000 paper on Machines and mindlessness: Social responses to computers. In that paper, Nass and Moon discovered that people sometimes unconsciously treat computers as human beings (in the sense that they respond to them socially), even though they are aware that they are interacting with just machines. The implications of these particular findings of Bailenson, et. al are fascinating. It could be that a political leader or influential leader of some sort (i.e. in a corporation) chooses to represent himself/herself in a CVE by incorporating subtle physical and behavioral characteristics of each member in his/her audience. Therefore, by making himself/herself appear more similar to the audience member (and even more powerfully, more similar not just in physical appearance but possibly in mimicking behavior as well), s/he can become much, much more persuasive and influential. More specifically, CVE technology can allow the leader to be represented differently to each and every member of his/her audience simultaneously so that each member is observing a different “hybrid” leader that incorporates and blends physical and behavioral characteristics of that particular audience member. I do agree somewhat with what was brought up in class: that is, could these leaders be that influential if, when CVE-based communications becomes more pervasive, everyone knows and is aware of its capability to change the physical and behavioral characteristics of the speaker in real-time? However, as I mentioned before, researchers have shown that people still treat machines (computers) that they know are not real people in social and human-like ways, and that people treat digital representations in virtual space with increased intimacy and liking even though they are cognizant of the fact that they are interacting with a computer representation and not a real human being. Therefore, it seems to be a logical extension that, even if people are aware of the possibility of a speaker’s physical and behavioral transformations in a CVE, they will still react to him/her subconsciously in altered ways. Clearly, further investigation needs to be done into this conclusion – nevertheless, it also seems as though we won’t be able to convincingly decide whether or not people will be significantly affected by transformations of self-representations in CVEs until CVEs become prominent and a frequently used method of mediated communication, if that even happens. However, it should be mentioned that some related investigations have already been completed. In this paper, Bailenson, et. al explain that studies have shown that when an experimenter that is represented as a digital avatar in a virtual environment subtly mimics the behaviors and movements of a participant (also represented as an avatar in the environment), the participant is more likely to say that they liked the experimenter more and that smoother conversation flowed during the interaction. What is especially interesting about this finding is that almost all of the participants of the study did not detect any sort of mimicking. Therefore, it could be the case that, in CVEs of the future, leaders won’t necessarily have to alter their physical representations in order to influence their audience members; they might only have to subtly mimic the behaviors and movements of each of their audience members in order to affect each of them. If the results of this particular study end up transferring to interactions within a CVE, then most of the audience members won’t even be able to detect any mimicking but will still be influenced by the speaker in significant ways. In addition, another Bailenson-led study (Transformed Facial Similarity as a Political Cue: A Preliminary Investigation, in press), discovered that males (but interestingly, not females) are more likely to say that they will vote for a political candidate whose photograph has been digitally altered to absorb sixty percent of their own facial structure compared to another political candidate whose photograph has not been altered. Sixty percent is a very high percentage, and the fact that most participants did not detect the presence of any morph in the photograph (again, as in the mimic studies mentioned earlier, and especially surprising since the morphs included features from their very own faces) suggests that people might not even detect significant alterations in physical and behavioral representations of avatars while communicating within CVEs. Clearly, the implications of how transforming self-representations and how Transformed Social Interaction (TSI) in general within collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) might dramatically change human communications in the future are fascinating. There are numerous positive implications, such as significant improvements in distance learning and occupational training. In this day and age, however, there are quite a number of negative implications as well, including advancements (and bombardments) in advertising and politicking. I believe that, if the use of CVEs becomes more prevalent in the future, more investigations will need to be done in order to ascertain whether or not interactants within the environment will be able to be truly communicate more effectively (than they would via other methods) with the addition of augmented information in the environment and more control in directing their nonverbal behaviors and physical appearances. |